Trans-Sister Radio

  "And so now you're using some field trip from the fall to try and bully her out. Is that fair?"

  "I would have investigated the field trip regardless of whether you were living with her. That's the truth."

  "But you wouldn't have pressured her this way, I believe. Is that true, too?"

  He stood up and motioned for me to remain where I was. Then he put his head out the doorway and asked his secretary if the lawyer had gotten back to her on what he called the Banks letter.

  "Yes. I think you're all set," I heard her say. "He had one tiny change, and I typed it in this morning."

  "May I have a copy, please?" he asked, and a second later he walked past me once more and returned to his heavy leather chair.

  "You can't take this with you," he said, handing me a piece of letterhead, "but I'm going to let you read it. You can tell Allison what's in it if you'd like. She'll get her copy on Monday."

  The letter was short and to the point: After reviewing what had occurred during the field trip to the maritime museum in the fall, the superintendent's office had determined that although she should not have allowed children to swim without parental consent--and never should she do such a thing in the future--she had done nothing in direct violation of her teacher's contract and no disciplinary action was needed.

  I nodded happily, unable to hide my surprise. "Oh, this is cheering news. I expect it will please her very much."

  "That wasn't my intention."

  "I know."

  "I was just doing my job."

  "I understand."

  "And I will still do what I can to have two sixth-grade classrooms in Bartlett with the same number of children in each, and a school where everyone isn't talking about somebody's sex change."

  "Mine."

  "Yes."

  "So she shouldn't view this as some sort of total vindication."

  "No," he said, and perhaps because he sounded so determined, I sat there for a moment expecting him to say something more. But he didn't. And so, finally, I left.

  Allison didn't want to make a big deal of the radio show, but she was always home well before five-thirty in the afternoon, and so she didn't have an excuse not to savor every minute with me. That Monday I baked cinnamon and vanilla Mandelbrot and prepared hot chocolate with just a hint of Amaretto. We listened to the program together, sometimes giggling and sometimes groaning, but there really wasn't a single moment in it that either of us thought could possibly make our lives any harder.

  The reporter, a fellow a tad younger than me named Kevin, began with just a bit of foreshadowing about what his focus would be on Tuesday night--the fact that my little decision would cause a third of Allison Banks's sixth-graders to be pulled by their parents from her classroom--but mostly he educated listeners about gender dysphoria. I thought he did a fine job, and I was very pleased that Jordan and Pinto had nice little roles in his story, too. It meant that I wasn't his only transsexual. And I was glad that he'd gone to Montreal to meet with the surgeon there who specialized in sexual reassignment. The doctor made the surgical grail that colors the existence of so many transsexuals sound like a sensible and wise life goal.

  Throughout dinner and into the early evening, I felt very close to Allison, even though one or both of us was always on the phone. The phone rang a lot, and not one call was from a crank or an anti-trannie kook. They were from Allison's friends and my friends, and people I knew at the university. They were from my acquaintances in the Gender Benders, and from people Allison had gone to school with more than two decades earlier. It was a hoot, and I understood why there were people in this world, including far too many transsexuals, who actually solicited this sort of attention.

  More important, based on the calls that just kept coming and coming and coming, I couldn't imagine the narrow-minded people who were plaguing us would dare to say an unattractive word about transsexuality or sexual preference ever again--at least within the confines of scenic Bartlett. Moreover, the best was yet to come! Tomorrow night those bigots would really be put through the radio wringer!

  That night in bed, however, Allison wasn't interested in making love. And that surprised me at first. And then it began to alarm me. Obviously we didn't have sex every night--not even every other night, or, some weeks, even every third or fourth night--and so the notion of a night without sex wouldn't alone have concerned me. Besides, I knew well the struggles Allison had been having since I had returned from Colorado, I understood her confusion about who I was and what that meant in bed.

  But I was hot-wired from my hope that people were about to back off. I was aroused by my fifteen seconds of fame.

  Unfortunately, something was different that night for Allison, and she resisted my caresses and kisses and suggestions that we couple. When we turned off the lights by the sides of our bed, I pulled her to me and for a moment we lay there like spoons, my arm wrapped around her tummy.

  "Good night, love," I said.

  "Good night, Dana."

  She never called me Dana in bed. And I never called her Allison. Think about it: Do lovers, especially lovers with any history together at all, ever use their partner's name when they're alone together in that small, erotic world of pillows and blankets and sheets? Of course they don't. First of all, unless you're into threesomes or multiples, there are only the two of you present. You don't need to specify to whom you're speaking. Nor do you need to get someone's attention across a big room: You're cozy. You're intimate. Your bodies are probably touching, for God's sake.

  Moreover, unless your parents were inhumanly cruel and named you Sweetheart or Punkin or Honey, you probably don't have a name that's appropriate for the close quarters of a bed. Terms of endearment? They make the most sense in the boudoir, and they sound best when one is on the verge of sleep.

  And so the simple sound of my name--two syllables, one vowel used two ways--was disconcerting. And hurtful. I had to work hard to resist the urge not to murmur something defensive or accusatory in response. In my head, however, I heard myself whisper, "Good night, Allison," and it had an edge to it that I just didn't like.

  No one on the school board was interviewed for the second part of the series, because Glenn Frazier and Judd Prescott had determined for legal reasons that they alone should represent the school district's "official" take on the story. A small part of me was disappointed: I would have loved to hear a loose cannon like the school board's Al Duncan shoot off his gaping maw of a mouth one more time and embarrass those Babbitt vulgarians who were tormenting Allison and me. Still, parents like Rich Lessard and Bea Hedderigg--parents who had pulled their children from Allison's class--were plenty happy to talk, and offer listeners their misguided and angry opinions.

  But there were also parents of some of the children who had remained in Allison's care, and they were eloquent and lovely to listen to. They said all the right things about Allison's competency in the classroom, and her right to live her life the way that she wanted when she was at home. And Allison's voice on the radio Tuesday night was a dream, much, much prettier than my oddly husky little bark.

  "Your voice sounds nice," Allison insisted, but I disagreed.

  "Hah! I sound like some over-the-hill tart--a brothel madam, maybe!"

  There were considerably fewer phone calls during dinner that night, in part, I imagine, because so many people had phoned us Monday evening. But I think there was another reason, too: Bartlett had been a tad bloodied by the second segment. Even if you agreed with Rich Lessard or Glenn Frazier, they still sounded a bit like a lynch mob. And no one likes to hear about a rural village trashing one of its own: It happens all the time, of course, but public radio listeners don't want to be reminded that Norman Rockwell painted only one aspect of small-town America.

  And the real star Tuesday night was neither Allison nor me. It turned out to be Sally Warwick, the eleven-year-old mastermind behind her class's cross-dressing curtain call. The kid just stole the show, especially when she talked about sneaking on
e of her dad's neckties from his armoire, or taking advantage of the fact that one of the boys in her class--she wouldn't say who--had a crush on her, and she knew she could use that to her advantage when she showed him the earrings and the skirt that she wanted him to wear.

  "We figured if I was the one who asked him, he'd go along. You see, when you think someone's cute, you do really weird stuff," she said, expressing a wisdom well beyond her years, and Allison laughed so hard that I thought she was going to spill her hot cocoa.

  Will joined us for dinner Tuesday night and brought with him a bottle of champagne. Together Allison and Will phoned Carly in her dorm room to make sure she was okay with her mom's continued notoriety, and then we let the answering machine handle the calls for the rest of the night.

  "To you two," he said, raising his flute. "Thank you for being such good sports."

  Midway through dinner, I think Will noticed what I'd suspected for days: Allison was beginning her retreat to that place she'd gone to years earlier without him--a place where he wasn't allowed--and that place I'd always feared she'd go to without me. Without discussing it, we both began trying to be almost neurotically charming and cheerful, but neither of us were able to make Allison laugh the way Sally Warwick had.

  Who knows? Maybe we were simply trying too hard. Maybe that had been our problem all along: We'd always tried too hard. Once separately, now together.

  Certainly a part of me had known from day one that eventually Allison and I would separate. Let's face it: If she had felt about a boyfriend the way she did about me, he probably would have been back in his own apartment by Groundhog Day. Maybe, if he was lucky, he could have hung on by his fingernails until Ash Wednesday.

  I sometimes wonder if it was in fact the very cruelties rendered by the Rich Lessards and Officer Culbersons of the world that had prolonged my stay in her house.

  Yet never--never!--did I imagine in February or March that it would be the Vermont radio program itself that would eventually lead to our separation, or that I would be the one who would initiate our disunion.

  Chapter 34.

  will

  ALLIE AND DANA WERE GOING TO BREAK UP. I suspected it when I was leaving their house after dinner Tuesday night, and I was sure of it when I woke up the next morning and I thought back on the evening we had shared. I knew as well as anyone the signs that a relationship was in its waning days, and I knew as well as anyone the cast of Allie Banks's face when she was unhappy and trying to figure out why--and what to do about it.

  And so when I was shaving Wednesday morning, I resolved to put some distance between me and the transsexual.

  That was, in fact, the word I used in my head as I looked at my aging eyes in the mirror. Not Dana, not Allie's girlfriend. The transsexual. I wanted to remain focused on what Dana was because those feelings that I had once viewed as merely ironic had become unpleasant when examined in the context of Dana's availability. That morning I was no longer sure why I was spending so much time with her--there was that pronoun again, haunting me with its anatomic specificity--and my motives had grown somewhat muddied. Clearly it was no longer about radio, and it was no longer about being around Allie.

  It was, I feared, simply about being around Dana.

  And the last thing I wanted was to know what really existed beneath that blouse or behind the folds of her skirt. Especially if, suddenly, Dana was going to be single and unattached.

  I did not miss the humor--sobering though it was--in the notion that when I contemplated the sudden availability of one half of the relationship, the first person I thought of was Dana. Not Allie. For the first time in years, both Allie and I were going to be uninvolved, and yet the first thought that crossed my mind had not been reconciliation. It had been something else. Something about that transsexual.

  When I threw cold water on my face and rinsed away the last traces of shaving cream, I resolved that I would no longer initiate any contact with the professor. I would not allow myself to be seduced by the illusion that had been created by some prescription pills and a surgeon and a little makeup.

  No, not a little makeup. A lot of makeup, probably.

  At least that's what I told myself.

  Yet even then an image crossed my mind: Dana in a silk slip before an Art Deco vanity mirror, applying lipstick. A glamour girl from bygone Hollywood. A knee crossed, and the smooth skin of ...

  I dressed quickly and went downstairs to brew a pot of coffee. I focused on Morning Edition, and wondered at the calls that would have come in overnight on our Reaction Line to the second part of the transgender story.

  And I decided that although Patricia's and my divorce was months from completion, I was going to date all the women I wanted. I wouldn't care if they were my age or they were young. I wouldn't care whether their noses were pierced and they took pride in their daddy complexes. I wouldn't care if they listened to VPR or to the shock jocks on competitive radio stations.

  And I reminded myself that I might be wrong about Allie and me. Wasn't it possible, despite my conclusion that my first wife and I were not destined to be together, that at some point in the not-too-distant future we would indeed be working our way back to each other? Certainly it was. Of course it was. Absolutely.

  I realized I was angry at the transsexual for the chimera she had created, and for the unfullfillable fantasies that she offered.

  Dating other women--dating real women, including, possibly, my first wife--with that mind-set would actually be rather easy, I decided. Especially now that I was over my youthful romanticism and reconciled to the belief that there wasn't one consummate woman out there who was meant for me. It was all random.

  And though it wasn't exactly meaningless, it was all merely adequate.

  Chapter 35.

  dana

  WE DIDN'T MAKE LOVE AFTER THE SECOND NIGHT of the radio story either. I had thought that we might, and when we didn't, I asked Allison what she was thinking. The bedroom smelled faintly of hand cream, and I could feel the shape of the vibrator through the pillow where--ever the optimist--I had placed it.

  "I'm thinking that I want to go to sleep," she answered, her face toward the wall.

  "You're thinking more than that."

  "Not by choice."

  "Then what?"

  She sighed, and I stroked her shoulder and the back of her neck through the quilt.

  "Are you tired of all this?" I asked, careful to keep my question vague. I wasn't sure myself what I meant.

  "Here's what I'm thinking," she murmured. "I'm thinking we shouldn't have this conversation at eleven o'clock at night."

  "You never want to talk in bed."

  "No, I don't. I don't like that kind of stress here."

  "Will this be a stressful conversation--when we have it?"

  "Dana: Stop. Please."

  "Stop touching you?"

  "Stop asking me questions. I want to sleep."

  I took my hand off her and fell back on my pillow. "Can I say one more thing?"

  "I doubt I can stop you. I've never stopped you from doing anything, now have I?"

  An allusion to my surgery? Probably. But I ignored it. "I just want to make sure you know that I appreciate everything you said on the radio. About personal choices. About teaching. About me. All of it." And then I turned off the light and assumed that would be the end of it for the night. Who knew what the morning would bring? Half the time when we said we'd talk about something the next day, we never did, and so a part of me was quite sure this conversation was over for the foreseeable future. Allison was just tired. Tomorrow, once more, everything would be fine.

  Oh, but not that night.

  I'd placed the vibrator on the nightstand on the far side of a pile of books and rolled over onto my side, and I'd begun to try to clear my head so I could sleep. Exorcise those demons that dog us every day, banish those moments--the good ones as well as the bad--that keep one awake. I thought only of the fact that I was warm in the bed and the pillow felt good,
and tomorrow I might bake some walnut-and-beer bread. I'd bake bread and read the manuscript for a new biography of George Sand a friend of mine at another university was writing. I'd wait for people to call with the news that they'd heard Allison and me on the radio, and to declare that the town was indeed behaving badly. It would be a glorious day.

  "I'm done with radio," Allison said suddenly, and in an instant I was wide awake.

  "Go on."

  "No, that's all there is. I'm glad I spoke my piece and said what had to be said. And now I'm done. No more interviews. No more discussion."